22 November 2016

Ambush in Bartlette - The Final Chapter (39)

“LIFE”

Yusif Habib looked around the empty
office. It was stripped bare. Nothing was on the walls. The only
thing on the desk was a closed portable computer. And, taped to the
back of chair behind the desk was the front page of the latest
Mountain Democrat. The two inch high headline said it all.

Underneath it, in Brad's unmistakeable
scrawl was one word.

“congratulations”

------------

Madeline Mullins sat at the kitchen
table at her house looking at the medium sized rock on her left hand.
Every romance novel she'd ever read told her that her heart should be
about to burst from joy. And yet, the best she was able to come up
with so far was ambivalence.

Sure, Yusif was a good guy. Heck, he
was probably the best guy she could hope to catch unless she moved to
Roanoke or Knoxville or some other city. Still, if he hadn't sprung
it on her at the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve – the very
moment he officially became the commonwealth attorney - she wasn't
sure she would have accepted.

What was further troubling, she
suspected that Yusif knew it. She found herself questioning whether
he knew she would waver and manipulated her so that she couldn't
refuse without looking like an ass. Or maybe he was just trying to be
romantic and made the moment as special as he could. All she was
certain about was that she really didn't feel like she had any choice
when she accepted.

Well, she had months before any viable
wedding date. She'd probably go through with it. Maybe.

--------

Robert “Bo” Ross stood in the
courtroom as Judge Isom swore him and his deputies in. The room only
had about half the usual number of deputies. Greg Harvey and a number
of other deputies had retired or found other jobs between the
election and now. Bo had refused to rehire several more. He was still
uncertain about a few of the remaining deputies, but he couldn't fire
everybody. Actually, he could, but then he and his chief deputy would
have to patrol the entire county twenty-four hours a day until new
ones could be hired. And, besides that, some of these guys deserved a
chance to prove themselves.

Next to Bo stood Patrick Mahan, now
wearing the gold oak leafs of a major. He was the new chief deputy
and Bo was happy to have him. Bo knew that Pat had left his job in
Boston after he got in trouble for being too honest in his testimony
during a major trial. As far as Bo was concerned that spoke volumes
for Pat's character. He could do worse than having a chief deputy who
was too honest.

As soon as all the formalities were
done, the two of them were going to get down to the business of
making the Bartlette County Sheriff's Department the best department
this side of Roanoke. And then they would make it even better.

----------

Father Jerome Tolton drove toward his
next job for Bishop Mannion. He'd thought the Bishop would return him
to the monasteries he'd been working with before he'd been sent to
Bartlette, but that was already being handled by another and Jerome
was being sent to Winchester instead.

The local church was thriving and well
run so there wouldn't be the usual problems Jerome dealt with.
However, the local prosecutor had just indicted the son of a
parishioner on a capital murder charge. An overly clever defense
attorney who saw how things turned out in Bartlette asked the Bishop
if the Church could help there too. Bishop Mannion had been all too
happy to assign Jerome to the task. Now Jerome was on his way to be
one of the attorneys representing Kyle Bialik.

He heard a chuckle from behind him in
the pickup truck's half-seat. “Murder and moral ambiguities. Your
God seems to be abandoning you to my keeping. We're going to have
fun, Father. Lots and lots of fun.”

-----------

Gill Pinsky sat at his desk enjoying a
bagel for the first time in weeks. The biggest problem with going out
to the stix was the lack of good, civilized food. The second biggest
was all the stuff that piled up in his office. So, he was killing two
birds with one stone.

He skimmed over a request by a judge
that he take a capital murder case in Lee County. It was over a week
old so he was certain someone had undertaken the defense by now.
Still, he would call the judge later today and politely decline. His
last foray to the wilderness would satisfy him for quite a while. The
end had never actually been in question, but dealing with the rubes
got under his skin after a while. He was going to be certain that all
his cases were in the civilized parts of Virginia for the foreseeable
future.

He picked up the next sheet of paper
and shoved all thoughts of backward counties in the middle of nowhere
from his mind.

----------

Brad Dollerby sat in his new office
reading the secret agent novel his mother-in-law had bought him for
Christmas. The hero was some sort of generic mix between Jason Bourne
and James Bond and there was nothing particularly original in it. He
knew the reason Abby had bought it for him. The whole story revolved
around someone setting off a suitcase nuke in Haysi, Virginia which
was about forty minutes north of Bartlette County. So far, the book
hadn't explained why anyone would nuke a town of five-hundred people.
It just had secret agents chasing each other around the world
stalking and shooting at each other. Normally, he would have thrown
away a book this bad after a couple chapters, but he knew Abby would
ask him about it and he didn't want to lie to her. Besides, he didn't
have anything else to do at the moment. Reading the book kept him
from dwelling on the disasters of the last few months.

He had appointments scheduled for this
afternoon, but this morning he was just sitting there in the hopes
that someone would come in and plop down a hefty retainer to sue his
neighbor because the jerk built a fence three inches over the
property line or some other vitally important issue which people were
willing to squabble about until the end of eternity.

He was in the middle of reading a
portion of the book where the bad-girl villainess was revealed to be
a misguided eco-warrior who bombed Haysi because . . . when Maggs
yelled through the open door at him.

“You've got a phone call on line
one.”

“Tell them to make an appointment
like everybody else.”

“Sure, Nickel, I'll tell the chairman
of the Republican Party of Virginia that he should get his butt in a
car and drive down from Richmond so that he can have an audience with
your majesty.”

On second thought, Brad reflected as he
reached for the phone, maybe I ought to take this call.

Ambush in Bartlette

Disclaimer

In case anyone out there needs this warning: This ain't legal advice. Everything in the blog is off the cuff and no one goes back and reads all the cases and statutes before blogging. The law may have changed; cases misread and misunderstood two years ago can still lead to a clinging misperception. Courts in your county, city, or State probably don't operate as described herein. Feel free to be inspired, but YOU MUST ALWAYS DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH OR HIRE A COMPETENT ATTORNEY TO DO SO because I haven't.